Eden:Regaining Our Spiritual Freedom by Chet Shupe

Chet Shupe’s professional background is in Electronics Engineering. As a young engineer never did he imagine he would someday be developing a thesis that addresses a broad spectrum of sociological issues. At some point at mid career however, he was inspired to apply his background in control theory to the human condition by looking at the brain as the controller of the life of the species. This has led to an engineering based, rather than a religious, sociological, psychological, or philosophically based assessment of the human condition. Out of this has come a unique perspective addressing the perplexing issues that increasingly face us, including, among others, our lack of intimacy and habitat destruction. Why is our world essentially without relational intimacy, when that is what we want most is to love and be loved? And why are we destroying the habitat that we need to survive?

To Shupe, the two issues are related, plus myriads of other ills from which our culture suffers. Shupe offers his answer regarding the source of these issues, and also suggests a path by which to recover our natural state of intimacy in our relationships and of harmony with the natural world.

Genre: Non-fiction Self-Help
A sociological view of the world we live in.
Publication Date: September 2011
Publisher: Acacia Publishing, Inc.

Website: http://www.spiritualfreedompress.com/

Amazon Print Book Link: 
http://www.amazon.com/Eden-Regaining-Our-Spiritual-Freedom/dp/1935089277/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340053571&sr=1-1&keywords=Eden%3A+Regaining+Our+Spiritual+Freedom

Amazon Kindle Link:
http://www.amazon.com/EDEN-Regaining-Spiritual-Freedom-ebook/dp/B005OZHCBG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1340053571&sr=1-1

Featured Essay published in Palo Verde Pages – October/December 2010 issue, available on Kindle at:
http://www.amazon.com/Verde-Pages-Magazine-October-ebook/dp/B0044XUYSM/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340053748&sr=1-3

Eden- Regaining our Spiritual Freedom  -  By Chet Shupe

Spiritual freedom, as presented in Eden, is rooted in brain dysfunction—mine.

Eden is an engineer’s perspective on the human condition—based on system control theory, not sociology.

What we each are looking for is to Love and to be Loved, but have created a world that offers only wealth and privilege.

In Eden we lived in the moment — according to the sensibilities of our souls

·         Loving and being loved is attending to one anther’s present needs

·         Seeking wealth and privilege is attending to the future

We expelled ourselves from Eden by trying to secure the future

·         Subjugated ourselves to legal systems—Kings, Gods, States, Institutions

·         To control our future we must that take care of ourselves according to the law of the land

In our natural state we gifted our brothers and sisters with our presence and unique skills

·         We didn’t worry about ourselves. Our brothers and sisters took care of us

·         To take care of life, and allow ourselves to be taken care of by life, is what intimacy is about. It is how we become part of the web of life. By trying to control the future we have separated ourselves from life.

What is happiness?

·         Happiness is intimacy. Given basic needs, if you have intimacy then you are happy.

·         Without intimacy, life is largely an issue of pain management – via religion, ideology, entertainment, technology, etc. Without intimacy, we live in pursuit of happiness.

Intimacy requires that we trust our lives to the human spirit.

Our spirits have existed for as long as our kind, upwards of 200,000 years, most of which was without legal systems. As such, our spirits are uniquely equipped to manage the future by attending to the moment.

Natural families are the key to intimacy

Trust our lives to others without separate legal and monetary identities, and without rules on the wall or on file that specify how we will serve one another.

The nucleus of that family, I speculate, will be a sisterly bond. The men, the brotherhood, will join, by the grace of the women, to help, support, and protect them and their children.

Eden is accessible to any body of people, who, having seen through the illusion of future control, are ready to trust their lives to the human spirit as manifest in one another.

Questions and Answers

Q: When we lived in Eden, spiritual freedom – i.e., being true to our feelings – may have worked, but hasn’t the Earth’s population become too large to even consider it?
A: Nature will eventually determine if the human population is too large. The decision is not yours, mine, nor that of any government. One thing is certain: If we were attaining our needs directly from the land, our per capita requirement for resources would be miniscule compared to now.
Q: One of the most severe issues facing our society is the dysfunction of the modern family. How would spiritual freedom change that?
A: Humans are members of a social species. Were we bonded according to our feelings, rather than legal arrangements, we would form extended families referenced in our material and emotional need for one another. Based on the examples of other social species, a female bond would likely be the nucleus of a natural human family. The men would be there, by the grace of the women, to protect the women and their children.
Q: Presuming basic needs, what we want more than anything is to love and to be loved, yet we live in a world largely without relational intimacy. Why?
A: Intimacy results from interdependent relationships. In our natural state, before there were monetary and legal systems, we lived in intimacy, as we depended directly on others to secure our material needs. Now we depend on money and law, instead of on one another, to survive. The result is spiritual alienation and estrangement, not intimacy. Love is the reward we receive for being true to life in our relationships with one another. Love is not intentional, but instead happens to us. Were our survival dependent on those around us, we would find ourselves loving our brothers and sisters. But we depend on money and the law to survive, not on one another, which explains why we love our money and institutions, instead of people.
Q: Will spiritual freedom result in a utopian or ideal existence?
A: No. Until someone can provide a generally-agreed-upon notion of what a utopian existence is, the question is meaningless. To seek a world where nothing bad happens, is to look for one that is void of creaturely existence. If by an ideal existence you mean a place where there is never any hunger, disease, anger, rejection, hurt feelings, armed conflict, or cause to mourn, then spiritual freedom will not result in Utopia. Furthermore, what we really want is intimacy, not perfection. In a world where everything was taken care of, there would be no need for one another, and thus also for intimacy.
Q: You say in spiritual freedom we are agents of our species. How could we be free if our behavior is dictated by the needs of our species?
A: If by the term “free,” you refer to absolute freedom, no such freedom exists. Without a transcending purpose to serve, life would be meaningless. By a woman realizing her desire to have and raise children, she finds her life meaningful. But our species needs the children, not her. Her children are meaningful to her only because our species expresses its needs through her – rewards her for serving it. We have only two choices: Remain a slave of the system, or become a slave of our species. The system rewards success with wealth and respectability. Our species rewards success with relational intimacy – the sense that we are as one with those around us, with our surroundings and with the essence of life itself. We would find enslavement to our species far more rewarding than enslavement to money and institutions.
Q: Spiritual freedom sounds like communal living. What is the difference between spiritual freedom and a commune?
A: By imposing rules, communes become spiritual prisons, just as states do by imposing laws. Communes soon evaporate because, when choosing between prisons, the spirit will always opt for the large one, like the state. A larger prison offers the spirit more places to drown its pain. Actually, the state is nothing other than a massive commune. It would evaporate also. The problem is, states now rule the world; there is no place to go.
Q: Two terms central to your thesis are the soul and the human spirit. What do you mean by these expressions?
A: I sometimes use them interchangeably – along with innate awareness, the heart, and instinct. But to be specific: The human soul is the accumulated body of information by which our species has, over evolutionary time, learned how to survive the natural world. It is genetically transferred from generation to generation and is the basis for our innate awareness. The human spirit is the expression of that knowledge. Innate awareness expresses the human spirit through feelings by which we – our conscious minds – are compelled to have us behave in ways that, presuming we are spiritually free, sustain our species.
Q: How did we lose our spiritual freedom?
A: To fix the future by social and material contracts, we were forced to outlaw most of the feelings by which our behavioral nature realizes its natural expression. Though we did not know it at the time, when we outlawed our behavioral natures we, in effect, decided our species’ physical nature could continue indefinitely despite having been stripped of its behavioral nature.
Q: What about head-hunting and other such practices we find in primitive cultures?
A: Once sisterly bonds are destroyed by allowing men to make exclusive and lifetime claims on women, all sorts of weird things begin to happen, head-hunting and civilization being only two. Of the two, civilization is more threatening to human existence. Head hunters do not destroy their habitat nor do they deploy atomic weapons.
Q: Don’t humans have a dark side from which we need protection?
A: Anything out of control is dangerous, even a machine. Out of control behavior certainly represents a dark side but, by destroying our natural families and communities by force of law, we create the very behavior we fear. As a result of destroying our natural homes, human behavior has been out of control since our expulsion from Eden – since we first began imposing social and material contracts. We then use the law to try to corral the danger we have thus created. By our legal systems, prisons, police and military forces we invest major resources in our effort to protect ourselves from our out-of-control behavior. But, because human behavior not governed by instinct is so destructive, our legal systems and police can’t even protect women and their children from rape and violence within their legal homes. Furthermore, historically, habitat destruction has been a major cause of civil failure. Combining that with the likelihood we are denaturing the Earth’s habitat as I write this, implies that life sustaining order, despite our massive investment in maintaining order, remains infinitely beyond our grasp.
Q: You say that female bonds form the nucleus of natural human families. What makes you believe female bonds are the reference for order?
A: Let me answer by asking, what do you think it is? Is the reference for order a king, a god, a religion, a constitution, an institution, money, a Supreme Court, some magical combination thereof, or what? Is the reference for order living, and thus an expression of life’s process, or dead, fixed for eternity by the written word? If you believe our species has a future then surely you have an answer to that question. You know mine.
Q: Is this thesis testable?
A: Sure. Should groups of women spiritually bond – trust their lives to each other without separate bank accounts and without rules that prescribe how they are to serve one another – where their wellbeing becomes one with the wellbeing of their sisters ; then the proof, or disproof, of Eden would be in the outcomes of those bonds, the issue being, do they experience intimacy, are continue to exist in a state of spiritual estrangement.
Q: But how could women ever get along with each other?
A: They can’t as long as they have separate monetary and legal identities. Women are territorial. In our natural state – no monetary or legal systems – they bonded with their sisters to form a home for their children and the men who joined to support them. Women were bonded by their territorial instincts. But now to establish a home, a women must bond with a man. As a result, women have become territorial enemies over men. In a world governed by edict, instincts have no natural outlet for their expression, and therefore express themselves in weird ways. Considering how often men fail women, emotionally and otherwise, for women to have become territorial enemies over men is the most confused expression of instincts imaginable.

E D E N – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom

by Chet Shupe

            In a world where people want nothing more than to love and to be loved, why do we live virtually without intimacy?
As a young engineer, Chet Shupe never imagined he would someday develop a thesis that addresses a broad spectrum of sociological issues. At some point in mid-career, however, he was inspired to apply his background in system control theory to understanding how all species are self governed. The result is a unique viewpoint addressing issues that increasingly perplex mankind including, among other things, our lack of intimacy. Intimacy—that sense of being as one with others and with our surroundings, where living in the moment is as natural as breathing. If we want to love and to be loved, what is there about our way of life that prevents it?
From Shupe’s point of view, our loss of intimacy was concurrent with our metaphorical expulsion from Eden. At that point our rational minds usurped our intuitive minds’ authority regarding our relationships with one another and with the land. We thought, by authorizing contracts, both social and material, we could bring about the futures we had in mind. But reality resides in the present, not in imagined futures. All images of the future that supersede the normal rhythms and seasons of life, are fabrications of our imaginations. Trying to realize imagined futures by force of law has resulted in a way of life that is, in essence, a cerebral fantasy. Little wonder our habitat is at risk while billions suffer the isolation of lives lacking intimacy. Only by our intuitive minds can we save the habitat and return to a state of intimacy.  According to Shupe, to honor our intuitions, we must anchor our lives in relationships, as we did in Eden, not in money and law.
After thousands of years of worshiping institutions, what might inspire us to again trust our lives to one another? The reward is intimacy.  Indeed, spiritual trust is the only path to intimacy. But to do so, we must first understand how our loss of intimacy happened. In Eden—Regaining our Spiritual Freedom, Shupe strives to offer the reader the comprehension required to know the boundless love that comes of being true to ourselves in our relationships.

Eden – Regaining Our Spiritual Freedom By Chet Shupe Retail price: $19.95 ISBN 978-1-935089-27-8

For review copies or interview requests, contact Karen Gray 480.892.4553 editor@acaciapublishing.com

Excerpts from Eden – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom

To be used as promotional materials – All rights reserved by the author and the publisher.

Eden – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom pp 210
Without our spirit’s freedom to prove its worth, we aren’t really alive. Spiritually, we are in survival mode.
Chet Shupe, Acacia Publishing, 360 pages, $19.95, online at www.acaciapublishing.com or by phone at 866-265-4553
Eden – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom pp 244
To be spiritually free is to live in intimacy. Presuming access to basic needs, like food, shelter and clothing, if we have love then nothing else really matters. And if we do not have love, then nothing else really matters anyhow.
Chet Shupe, Acacia Publishing, 340 pages, $19.95, Available at bookstores and Amazon.
Eden – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom pp 232
To savor a glass of wine, we select a wine in which we find pleasure. As spiritual prisoners, on the other hand, we routinely choose to behave in ways that don’t taste (feel) right, and then rationalize to explain our behavior. We sip a lot of bitter wine.
Chet Shupe, Acacia Publishing, 360 pages, $19.95, online at www.acaciapublishing.com or by phone at 866-265-4553
Eden – Regaining our Spiritual Freedom pp 274
When first considering spiritual freedom, the idea of spiritual trust may seem ridiculous, if not outright offensive, relative to the value we place in our bank account. But as we become increasingly aware of how that bank account enslaves and isolates us spiritually in virtually every dimension of our existence, there may come a time when those imagined brothers and sisters look like pure gold relative to anything our bank could possibly hold in store for us.
Chet Shupe, Acacia Publishing, 340 pages, $19.95, Available at bookstores and Amazon. 

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